


Cut and Run

by greyofsonshine



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, Character Death Fix, F/F, Gen, Tex Lives Fic, okay but did we see Tex die? Where’s the proof?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-05
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-05 00:48:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18355181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greyofsonshine/pseuds/greyofsonshine
Summary: Tex ran.Because that’s what she was good at. Because that’s what she did.But when she sees Carolina alive and well on universal television, she can’t run anymore.If only she could actually find her.A fic that takes place during seasons 11-13 where Tex escapes the Meta and teams up with Sister and Andrews to find out where the Reds and Blues went.





	1. I was born to run—Can't slow down

**Author's Note:**

> I _know_ I keep starting fic and abandoning them after two chapters but this one's different I swear!! Anyways Tex should be in season 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Born to run  
> I can't slow down  
> No regrets, I did my best  
> Born to run  
> In time you'll see

Tex ran. 

That’s what she was good at, right? Running away? Leaving? Abandoning the people she cared about for her own sake?

She had told herself, again and again, that Allison’s mistakes were not hers. She was not just a shadow. She was free to make her own decisions. Her own mistakes. 

But she made the same goddamn ones. 

She ran from Freelancer. She ran from the Alpha. She ran from Carolina. She ran from Blood Gulch. She ran from Church. 

She was running from the Meta. 

Because that’s what she did. She ran. 

 

*****

 

The months she spent trapped in Valhalla were... boring. The sim troopers stationed there were as stupid as any other group of them, but their stupidity wasn’t to the point of interesting yet. She’d been willing to wait, but Omega got bored far quicker than she did, and she was tired of trying to hold him back. 

Omega caused a ruckus at blue base, like he always did. He completely destroyed any chances she had at possessing someone and escaping; any blue that started acting even a little bit strange got locked away. And, what, like Tex was gonna possess a _red_? (it wasn't like she was skilled enough to completely take over someone’s body, anyway).

So Tex spent months in Valhalla doing nothing at all. She hung out with Sheila a bit, but she was too low on power to talk for long. She spoke to Gary, but he was... _Gary_ , so that didn’t last long either. In the end she just rested. Computers needed that, didn’t they? To be shut down every once in a while, to reset? She didn’t know. She was never taught how to take care of technology, let alone an AI. Maybe the Director thought if she knew too much she’d figure it out. Maybe he didn’t want her to be able to take care of anything without him. 

Regardless, she didn’t know shit. 

But resting felt good. 

So she rested. 

...

Until her rest was rudely interrupted. 

“You have to go.”

Omega was in her head again, and she hadn’t allowed it. 

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you! I’m serious.” 

Tex’s mindscape was a grassy field of yellow roses, bluebonnets, and forget-me-nots. A storm constantly raged on the horizon, dark and pouring and loud. Wherever Omega stood in her mind, the flowers died and the storm came a little closer. Tex was done with it. 

“Get out of my head, asshole. I’m going back to sleep.”

“ _Tex_.” He looked at her, wearing an expression she’d never seen before. If she didn’t know any better, she’d call it desperation. 

“He’s here.”

Tex didn’t have to ask who “he” was. “Shit. All right, let’s go.”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no? You just said we had to go.”

“ _You_ have to go. He already knows I’m here.”

Tex paused. “So? We’ve outrun him before.”

“Not while he’s this strong and you’re this weak.”

“Fuck you, I’m not weak.”

“You’ve spent the last eight months sulking in your own mind. Don’t be a fool.”

Jesus, had it really been eight months? “I have _not_ been _sulking_.”

“We don’t have time for this. He already took Gary.” Omega paused, and wore an expression Tex would call sad on anyone else. “He thinks I’m hiding in blue base. I can chase him around the reds for a bit; you get the fuck out of here.”

Tex stared at him. He looked different than she remembered. His armor was more purple. The ever present anger in eyes had worry mixed in. The grass was dead around his feet but the roses—

The roses were red. 

Tex didn't know what changed. This... _thing_ that had been a parasite in her mind was now... Not that anymore. She had questions that she couldn't ask, that wouldn't be answered.

The storm both subsided and raged harder than ever.

“I thought you’d rather die than join the Meta.”

O’Malley didn’t respond to that, simply saying, “you gonna go?”

She got ready to jump, then realized— “Wait. O’Malley. You can’t let him know about Chu—.”

O’Malley scoffed, “Why the hell would he care about your shitty ex-boyfriend?” 

She nodded at him. She didn’t know what his plan was to keep the secret, but she had to trust that it would be enough. 

“See you later, Tex.”

She smiled and gave a small salute.  “See you soon, Mal.”

 

 *****

 

The Meta killed every single red in the base to get to her. 

Except one. 

He was a runner, too. He was a coward (she was a coward, didn’t even try to fight, too tired, too weak). He was hiding, watching all of his teammates get killed without even a thought that he should help. 

Maybe he wasn’t a coward. 

Maybe he was just smart. 

Tex stayed with him, hiding. Cowering. Being smart. She was sure that when the last red died, the Meta would turn to her, to Walter Henderson, to finally rip her from the fantasy of safety she’d been living in for the past few years and into the harsh, vengeful reality she’s been denying for so long. 

She waited for the blow to come. 

It never did. 

She hid in a cave with Walter Henderson for three weeks. She was sure the Meta was still waiting for her. He was sure that monster was still waiting for him. 

It never came. 

What came was recovery agents. 

Something the Meta did must have finally set off a beacon. They locked down Valhalla. They gave Henderson the food and water he needed. And they gave Tex the access to the Freelancer network she did. 

She hesitated a moment before jumping. Henderson had saved her life. He was going to be taken to Freelancer headquarters, interrogated for any information he knew, and then killed because he knew too much. Could she save him? Should she? Did she owe him? Anything she tried would alert her presence to Freelancer. To the Director. Whatever she owed him wasn’t worth that much. 

So Tex did what she was good at. 

She ran. 

And she didn’t look back. 


	2. Fed to the rules and I hit the ground running

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Well  
> The years start coming and they don't stop coming  
> Fed to the rules and I hit the ground running  
> Didn't make sense not to live for fun  
> Your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb

“Go ask her.”

“I ain’t askin’ her, you ask her.”

“Well  _I_  ain’t askin’ her, it was your idea!”

“Yeah, exactly,  _I_  came up with the idea, so I already did my share o’ the work which means  _you_  gotta ask her.”

“Comin’ up with an idea ain’t work! It’s just thinkin’!”

“Well, thinkin’s more work than you’ve ever done!”

Tex sighed. The two idiots she worked this guard job with must’ve  _thought_ they were whispering, but even if Tex’s sensors didn’t let her hear up to five times what a human could she still would’ve heard them from where she stood ten feet away. 

“Hey. Idiots.”

The idiots jumped. 

“What do you wanna ask me?”

They looked at each other, then to her, then back at each other, then back to her. The one with the lighter red armor, Jan, the one who didn’t come up with the idea, took a step forward. 

“W-well, miss Tex. We been wonderi-“

“Don’t call me miss.”

The one with the darker red armor, John, the one who thought thinking counted as work whacked Jan in the arm. 

“I’m sorry! Mister Tex,”

She’d take it. 

“Y’ see, John and I were wonderin’... well, we wanted to know if you- I’m sure you heard the news lately? About Project Freelancer? And you were in a cool secret UNSC project, so we was wondering if you, uh...”

Tex sighed. She hadn’t heard the most recent news about Freelancer, but stories would pop up every now and again. “Agent Texas” wasn’t a prominent feature but you could definitely find her in a couple of reports. Black-armored badass named Tex and black-armored badass called Agent Texas wasn’t a hard comparison to make. She just couldn’t believe these two idiots were the first to figure it out. 

“Yeah?” She asked, hoping to just get it over with. 

“We- we wanted to know if, if uh—“

“You ever met one?” John jumped in. 

Tex stared at him. “What.”

“An AI! It’s all over the news, that Freelancer was torturing them AI, and I know other programs had ‘em and I know you don’t like when we ask about your past but I gotta know-“

“ _We_  gotta know”

“You didn’ even ask her!”

“I was gonna!”

They squabbled for a moment and Tex stood there, relieved. Relieved? Yes, definitely relieved her secret was safe. (she didn’t anyone to know. she wanted them to know. she wanted to talk to someone. she never wanted to talk to anyone). She couldn’t believe she really thought  _these_  morons would be the ones who cracked the code to her tragic backstory. 

Tex went back to guarding whatever this facility she was being paid to guard was. After a couple of minutes, the two stooges seemed to settle their argument and started looking at her, expectantly. 

“What?” She asked, not actually wanting to know what.

They glanced at each other and then asked her in unison, “have you ever met an AI?”

Tex considered lying, but being a part of a top-secret military organization with no AI would probably be more suspicious. 

“Yeah,” she shrugged. 

The uproar that occurred made her immediately regret her honesty. 

“What are they like?”

“Are they really smarter than any people ever was?”

“Are they, uh, sentient?”

“Jan says their people but I think toasters ain’t people—”

“They ain’t toasters! If they got feelings like you and me they deserve rights—“

“A dog’s got feelings! That don’t make them people!”

“But dogs got rights too—“

“Dogs can’t  _vote_ —“

“They  _should_ —“

“ _ **STOP**_!” They both jumped at Tex’s outburst. She took a second to compose herself. “Stop. Shut up, walk away, and don’t bother me ever again.” 

She didn’t want to talk about this. The years since Valhalla Tex didn’t think much about AI. She learned enough to take care of herself and nothing more. She didn’t care about rights, or sentience, or morality or mortality or  _any_  of it. It wasn’t her problem anymore. She was done with it.

The twins seemed to have enough sense to know when to back off. They went back to their stations and stood guard. About ten minutes passed before their good sense wore off. 

“You know,” John started, and Tex’s hand twitched towards her gun, “me and Jan, we was a part of Freelancer.”

“Yeah! We were the best damn soldiers High Ground’d ever seen!”

“Hell yeah, we were! We kicked Blue Team's ass!”

They proceeded to do some kind of elaborate handshake and Tex couldn't help but put her head in her hands. Of _course_ they were sim troopers. And not just sim troopers, they were _Reds_. It was just her fucking luck.

No matter where she ran, the past kept catching up with her.

She guessed she just had to run a little faster.

Jan and John didn't seem to be halfway done with their handshake, which now seemed to involve a bizarre dance number. Tex started at snapping at them to stop; her Automatic Fight Choreographer unfortunately recorded choreography from things other than fights. Tex didn't know how much data storage she had in her brain, but bad dance routines were definitely a waste of it.

“Hey, idiots. You shouldn't tell people shit like that. You know they're offering good rewards to anyone who has info of Freelancer members' whereabouts? I could turn you two in and make bank.”

Jan stopped mid-hip-bump while John did not, leading to them both crashing into the side of the building.

“Aw, well, we know you wouldn't give us up Tex,” Jan said as she used John as a prop to stand up. “We trust you!”

“Why the hell would you do that.”

“Well, we're friends!” John replied, while trying to pull himself up with Jan's arm but instead pulling her down.

“No, we are definitely not,” Tex said, but found herself offering them a hand up despite herself. They both grabbed her hand and made what was probably an attempt at pulling her down with them. They did not succeed.

“So what, you gonna turn us in?” Jan said after they were both comfortably upright again.

Of course, she wasn't. She wanted nothing to do with Freelancer, and turning them in would just put undue attention onto her. (she liked these two. they were her friends).

“Pssh, nah. You two were probably so low on the command chain it wouldn't pay the gas to get you there.”

Immediate, indignant yells insisting what a valuable bounty they would be was the response Tex got. She laughed and leaned against the wall, listening to them argue. Being surrounded by loud idiots was her comfort zone, apparently. Shame she was gonna have to leave.

No connections to Freelancer. At all. Not even two Red Team dumbasses from High Ground.

She'd spent the last 5 years running. Even longer, if you count before Valhalla. She could run a little more.

But for now, she thought as she tuned back in to Jan and John's bickering, which seemed to now be about something called Pokemon and catching, for now, she could wait.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote both this chapter and the next chapter and they both had the same plot purpose (letting tex know carolina was still alive) but I felt like they both had different characterizations of tex and I was partial to both of them so I ended up just rewriting each one a little and keeping them both! so a little redundant but double chapter update! next update we meet sister


	3. Run back to your side

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Well, I don't wanna be here  
> When the sun goes down  
> I don't wanna be here  
> When the sun goes down  
> Another day goin' nowhere  
> In this lonesome town

“Hey, missy.”

Tex ignored him. 

“Little missy,” the man snapped in front of her face. “You ignoring me?”

Tex sighed. “I’m not ignoring you, because I  _know_ it ain’t me you’re calling ‘little missy’”

The man grinned wide at her. He was ugly, like every other shifty fucker at this bar. Scars that Tex would usually find attractive laid disgusting on his face. He was a foot taller than her, three times as wide. She bet he thought it made him scary. To her, he just looked pathetic. 

“And what if I was, huh? What’chu gonna do about it?” 

Tex couldn’t smell his breath, but she could sense the alcohol particles coming off of it.

Definitely pathetic. 

“See, I been hearing that you’re the arm wrestling champ ‘round here. That you’re ‘undefeated.’ And a little missy like you? Well, I say that’s bullshit.”

“You want a match?”

There was an uproar around her, and Tex realized they had an audience. Damn. Couldn’t a girl pretend to drink at a bar in peace?

“Well, what do you think?” The man laughed. 

Tex sighed. She was just here to get some work; she didn’t feel like having to repair her arm later because some asshole decided to start a dick measuring contest. 

This was a merc bar, where soldiers who got fucked over by the UNSC’s experiments ended up when the war was won. A lot of big egos who thought their project was gonna be the one to do it. None of them were, and now they all had a lot to prove. 

A woman who for some reason thought she was Tex’s friend came up behind her. They had worked together, at most, three times, but apparently that was enough for her to think she could put her hands on Tex’s shoulders. 

“Come on, you can’t let him talk to you like that! You gotta take this home for the ladies,” the woman said. 

Tex didn’t have anything to prove, certainly not “for the ladies.” The crowd was getting big, people were placing bets. Normally, Tex would be all for the money, but if someone was stronger than she calculated for, repairs would cost more than she could make on bets. She may gamble, but only when she was sure she’d make out on top. 

(she’d never miscalculated someone’s strength with O’Malley there).

Besides, ruining men’s egos the same way got boring after a while. She had to switch it up sometimes. 

So Tex pushed the woman’s hands off her and stood up as tall as she could. She didn’t come close to the mans height but she never had to be big to be intimidating. She looked the man in the eyes, downed the drink she’d been pretending to nurse, wiped the whiskey off her lips with the back of her sleeve and said, “Nah.”

The uproar died as quickly as it started as people realized what Tex said. She sat down again and motioned at the bartender to refill her drink. 

“What do you mean, ‘nah?’” The man asked. 

“Yeah, what do you mean, ‘nah!?’” The woman asked. 

Tex glanced at the man as she pretended to sip her scotch. 

“Nah.”

From the months she spent in Blood Gulch, Tex had gotten good at tuning people out. She barely heard the arguing around her as she sat and swished her bourbon. She pretended to watch the TVs over the bar, which turned into her actually watching the TVs because it was hard to pretend to look at something. The nearest one was playing Grifball, and while people blowing up was amusing the amount of rules in organized sports always turned her off to them. She looked at one of the TVs further down. There was always one playing news here, because the people here were ex-soldiers and they were all waiting for another war to start. Her conversation with John and Jan flashed through her mind. New news on Freelancer had come out. That wasn’t her business anymore. A part of her told her to keep watching, but she was good at ignoring that part. She turned back to Grifball game when something caught her eye. The words “Red” and “Blue” and a suit of armor that hadn’t meant anything to her in a long time. She didn’t think anything— just got up to go check it out. Someone grabbed her arm. 

The ugly man was still standing next to her, somehow even more hideous now that he was angry. For some reason, he seemed to think he could grab her without losing his hand. 

“Now I know you’re not walking away from me,  _little missy._ ”

Normally Tex would be happy to beat him down, but she didn’t know how long the news station stayed on a story. 

In the year or so that she’d been going to this bar, people started asking her questions. Where was she from, what branch of the military she was in, how the hell she got so strong. One question she could never brush off, though, was why her glass never got any emptier. Rumors started flying, and she didn’t need it getting to anyone important that someone in black armor named Tex who couldn’t eat or drink was around. So even though she didn’t know shit about her body, she installed a pocket where she could store the drinks she bought to make herself look busy. She managed okay, though there was a slit in the back of her neck that meant she couldn’t be out of armor without a collar or scarf. 

After a while, she got sick of regurgitating all the alcohol back out her mouth when she got home and decided to install a more interesting disposal system. 

Tex unlocked something in her mouth and blew. A blast of flame flew out of her mouth, directly into the guys face. He screamed, and the deterred audience came back in force, cheering and jeering and trying to put out the man’s now lit hair. Tex didn’t care; she’d gotten herself free. She shoved her way through the crowd, getting a good angle of the TV for the tail end of the story. It was only there for a few seconds, but Tex saw it. 

"Red and Blue Simulation Soldiers Uncover UNSC Conspiracy"

There the idiots were, smiling and posing and proud. Sarge stood perfectly still and stoic, the picturesque military man. Simmons stood trying to imitate him but kept shifting awkwardly and smiling nervously. Grif leaned lazily on the bruteshot- where the hell did he get- and Donut switched his pose three times in the seconds Tex saw him. Caboose was facing the wrong way, waving at somebody, and Tucker was gesturing towards his dick. Next to him, Agent Washington stood, as military as Sarge was in posture but with a nervous smile, looking not at the cameras like everyone else (sans Caboose) but to his right. 

And to his right was a short old bald man, shaking hands with her. 

Her expression was fierce but her smile unmistakable. She had a face full of makeup and her short hair dyed a bright red. 

Her green eyes pierced the screen and stared directly into Tex’s. 

Agent Carolina was alive.  

  
  


 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote both this chapter and the last chapter and they both had the same plot purpose (letting tex know carolina was still alive) but I felt like they both had different characterizations of tex and I was partial to both of them so I ended up just rewriting each one a little and keeping them both! so a little redundant but double chapter update! next update we meet sister


End file.
